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Show Chapter I. General Introduction to the Project: The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics 42 Contrasting my approach to rational choice with Edward McClennen's, I argue that his analysis of resolute choice in fact does not depend on the Humean conception to which he professes allegiance. On the contrary, it expresses a deeper, basically Kantian conception of transpersonal rationality. Chapter V then addresses the problem of moral motivation, and shows how the transpersonal principles of rationality developed in Chapters II and III directly cause action without any necessary intervention of desire; how they function descriptively as explanatory and predictive principles for a fully rational agent of the sort described by Kant's normative moral theory; and finally contrasts the psychology of an agent motivated by egocentric rationality with that of an agent motivated by transpersonal rationality. Chapter VI then applies this account of transpersonal motivation to an analysis of the moral emotion of compassion, and argues that far from excluding impartiality, as Humean Anti-Rationalists such as Lawrence Blum claim, true compassion presupposes it. 7.3.2. A First Critique Analysis of Pseudorationality Part II of Volume II addresses the ways in which we systematically deviate from the ideal of transpersonal rationality described in Part I. Here, too, Kant's account of the synthetic unity of apperception in the first Critique's Transcendental Deduction is the inspiration. For if a necessary condition of unified selfhood is its internal horizontal and vertical consistency, then the self is disposed to preserve that consistency - i.e. is disposed to literal selfpreservation - against anything that threatens it. And then anomalous data that defies conceptualization in terms of our familiar categories of thought truly must be for us "nothing but a blind play of representations, that is, less even than a dream," as Kant claims at A 112. In that case the gap between what we actually perceive, feel and do on the one hand, and how we conceive of those events on the other is bridged only when those events can be made horizontally and vertically consistent with our conceptions, and not otherwise. In Chapters VII and VIII I focus particularly on the case - basically Aristotle's intemperate character - in which the motivational efficacy of the intellect is overridden by stronger forces, and the agent's will intellectually reconfigured to accommodate them, producing pseudorational apologia and ideologies that excuse these deviations from rationality to self, to conscience and to others. The concept of pseudorationality introduced in Chapter VII refers to the ways in which we systematically and ruthlessly force those events into the Procrustean bed of our preconceptions, ignoring or butchering or distorting them to fit the requirements of literal self-preservation. Chapter VIII applies this analysis of pseudorationality to the case of greatest interest for moral theory: that in which the anomalous events in question are our own, first-personal desires, emotions and actions. Chapter VIII also offers a © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
